I've been a long time holdout clinging to my old iPod classics for portable music rather than considering a smartphone as my DAP. It was a question of sufficient capacity to hold my 300gB plus and growing ALAC or FLAC library and SQ. I recently checked out smartphones purported to be good DAP's and narrowed it down to the LG V30 and the iPhone Xs. The LG V30 won on price especially since it takes Micro SD cards. The iPhone Xs won out on integration with all my other Apple products and apps even though the internal storage capacity and the phone are more costly. I decided not to pull the trigger because my iPhone 6+ and iPod Classics otherwise met my needs, not withstanding my wanting to get down to just one device to carry around.
I was all but decided to get a FiiO X5 lll for our upcoming Christmas road trip so I could take all my music and enjoy wireless connectivity with the SUV we're renting. Then my 6+ went south so with the $200 trade in and the $500 I was ready to spend on the X5 it nearly cut the cost by half. So I went for the iPhone Xs 512 gB which astounds me. I've never been much of a "phone guy". I was in the wireless business for nearly 30 years and always had a free house account and whatever phone they gave me. My personal phones including the 6+ have generally been my wife's old phone when she get's the bug for the hot new phone. I think my last "hot new phone" was a Motorola StarTac which with the 3 watt car kit booster retailed in '96 for $3200.
So after a week or so with the Xs I'm very impressed with my new phone's audio performance. The sound quality using iTunes or Tidal with my big Monolith M1060C's orthodynamic headphones is very good and surprisingly the iPhone has enough power to drive them well. Kudos to both Monoprice and Apple on that, but I'm not pleased about having to buy a $9 Lightning to 3.5mm stereo plug adapter for a new $1450 phone. I wanted to try my FiiO DAC/AMP so I went cheap and bought an Amazon Basics Lightning to MicroUSB adapter. No dice, no sound at all. After more reading it became apparent that for noise and glitch free digital audio output the $38 Apple Camera adapter was the way to go. I was surprised when I first plugged it in that the iPhone downloaded a firmware update for the adapter. Definitely this is not a passive adapter. Anyway the SQ gets another huge boost using the FiiO Q1, completely exceeding my expectations and needs for portable audio SQ.
I run Audirvana on my Apple computers so my main library is FLAC. So there's one last change to make which will be eliminating the need to maintain a duplicate ALAC library in iTunes. Since the new iPhones and AppleTV process FLAC files I need to find an iOS music player app for FLAC instead of iTunes. VOX will be the 1st one I try once I can find the time to play with it. I don't want to pay monthly for cloud service to host my own music library, so I may still have to use iTunes file sharing to load the library on the iPhone. Time will tell.
I was all but decided to get a FiiO X5 lll for our upcoming Christmas road trip so I could take all my music and enjoy wireless connectivity with the SUV we're renting. Then my 6+ went south so with the $200 trade in and the $500 I was ready to spend on the X5 it nearly cut the cost by half. So I went for the iPhone Xs 512 gB which astounds me. I've never been much of a "phone guy". I was in the wireless business for nearly 30 years and always had a free house account and whatever phone they gave me. My personal phones including the 6+ have generally been my wife's old phone when she get's the bug for the hot new phone. I think my last "hot new phone" was a Motorola StarTac which with the 3 watt car kit booster retailed in '96 for $3200.
So after a week or so with the Xs I'm very impressed with my new phone's audio performance. The sound quality using iTunes or Tidal with my big Monolith M1060C's orthodynamic headphones is very good and surprisingly the iPhone has enough power to drive them well. Kudos to both Monoprice and Apple on that, but I'm not pleased about having to buy a $9 Lightning to 3.5mm stereo plug adapter for a new $1450 phone. I wanted to try my FiiO DAC/AMP so I went cheap and bought an Amazon Basics Lightning to MicroUSB adapter. No dice, no sound at all. After more reading it became apparent that for noise and glitch free digital audio output the $38 Apple Camera adapter was the way to go. I was surprised when I first plugged it in that the iPhone downloaded a firmware update for the adapter. Definitely this is not a passive adapter. Anyway the SQ gets another huge boost using the FiiO Q1, completely exceeding my expectations and needs for portable audio SQ.
I run Audirvana on my Apple computers so my main library is FLAC. So there's one last change to make which will be eliminating the need to maintain a duplicate ALAC library in iTunes. Since the new iPhones and AppleTV process FLAC files I need to find an iOS music player app for FLAC instead of iTunes. VOX will be the 1st one I try once I can find the time to play with it. I don't want to pay monthly for cloud service to host my own music library, so I may still have to use iTunes file sharing to load the library on the iPhone. Time will tell.
